Jarrad Powell is a composer on the faculty of the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington. Kent Devereaux is a composer in residence at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California.
Devereaux: I guess, what I’m most curious about is how you deal with the issue of individuality and community in your own compositions. It seems to me that serious music, for lack of a better term, and minimalism especially, has arrived at a problematic point in its history where the fetishization of the individual has so irreparably altered the nature of music-making in America that it is difficult, at best, for a composer to express an individual voice while, at the same time, forging a common musical language. Does the renewed interest in tonality raise the possibility of a new common practice emerging, based not upon the previous tenets of nineteenth century common practice but an amalgam of historical and ethnomusicological models?
Powell: The issue of community versus individuality is a very important one, because it relates to all aspects of culture, not just music. Americans are really intoxicated with the cult of the individual. And yet if you look around, you see that most people do not really value true individuality. Nor do they take the time to really discover their own individuality. Instead, they by-and-large conform to societal norms and are indoctrinated with these norms through education, mass media and advertising. Now conforming to societal norms has always been important for the survival of a culture, so it is not intrinsically bad. In this respect, the traditional arts often serve to establish or reaffirm a person’s place in the community and the community’s place in history and the cosmos. At the same time the traditional arts can also provide a context within which a person can have a transformative and transcendent experience within that social context. On the other hand, I feel that the concept of individuality is tied to the idea of freedom and that freedom represents the evolution of human potential. So there evolves the dialectic between tradition and freedom, between human potential and social stability.
In America we have now entered an era that consists no longer of institutional stabilization but of institutional decay. We see this decay on every front manifested as so-called ‘crises’: the drug crisis, the environmental crisis, the crime problem, the homeless problem, the problems of governmental deception and corruption, and so on. The institutional reaction to this is to increase domination and repression. So we are faced with a situation where the traditional arts might only serve to reaffirm a status quo that, from the standpoint of human freedom and human potential, is undesirable. The arts can be a means of perception, but they can also be a veil to perception. So artists must consider this dialectic and decide in which direction their own work will be committed. Suzi Gablik suggests that modernism’s fundamental mode was confrontation: the artist was isolated and cut off from society. Now we must look to a more holistic and ecological model for the arts, where individuality is valued, but so is interaction. So this question of community versus individuality is one that every artist should examine, because it is clear that individuality is rewarded in our culture, particularly if the product of that individuality is something that can be easily commodified. Yet what we must now recognize, I believe, is the ecological principle of unity through diversity. Unity can be achieved through likeness and similarity, or through differentiation and interdependence. As a race we have failed to understand the subtlety of interaction on both a personal and global scale. It is easy for us to see the relationship between things that are similar. Where we have failed is in our ability to see the relationship between things that are different; we have failed to see the way that all things interpenetrate.
In as much as minimalist music utilizes the traditional tuning system and intervallic relationships it can be seen, I suppose, as a renewed interest in tonality. But so can the so-called new romanticism. The label minimalism was appropriate for composers such as Glass, Reich, Young, and Riley whose work developed in the 60s and 70s. It was appropriate because of principles that it shared with certain visual artists, for example, Serra, Buren, and Smithson, to whom the label was first applied. Like the work of these visual artists, this so-called minimalist music utilized mundane materials (simple tonal motifs, scales, ostinatos, drones, etc.) as building blocks to create the musical work. Secondly, the emphasis on process counteracted the mystification of the compositional process. Instead the compositional process was revealed directly in the work. Finally, the nature of the work (repetition, extended time frames) forced the listener’s attention back on the perceptual process itself, just as many minimal visual works did. Gradually minimalist composers became more concerned with formalism and presentation. This was dictated by the growing acceptance of the work as music and the need for commodifying it. Likewise, minimal visual artists saw their work commodified by the gallery/museum system, which in the end directed attention back to formal elements. Also minimalist music, in its early stages, explored the relationship between trance and music and thereby acknowledged other uses of music that were not addressed by the so-called serious music of the time. So in as much as minimalism raised these important concerns it has been an evolutionary music, but when it abandons these concerns it really becomes a normalizing or even reactionary music that supports the status quo, retaining only the surface features of minimalism.
Nowadays music that uses repetition is often labeled minimalism, but it usually is not. John Adams is a perfect example. He is a composer who has always been concerned with form, color and dramatic gesture. His works strip minimalism of its authentic concerns and “dress it up” with fancy orchestration and compositional craftsmanship. Ellen Fullman is the only person whose work I have seen/heard lately that impresses me as an interesting extension of minimalism. With her Long String Instrument she has returned to the basic use of long tones and drones in just intonation and more-or-less picks up where La Monte Young left off. At the same time she moves the music in new directions with her introduction of sculptural and spatial elements and the unselfconscious ritual qualities manifested in the performance of the music.
I must say that I am not really interested in the possibility of a so-called common practice. Common practice is a historical notion and history has lied to us, because it has not taught us how to live, but has turned us against the earth on which we live. There has never been a common practice in music, only narrow horizons as to what constitutes music (ethnocentricity). The notion of common practice can be seen as a historical lie and an undesirable mythology, since it fosters the idea of unity through conformity. If you mean by tonality the tertiary system of harmony that developed in Western music, then I think a return to that is undesirable. The development of this way of organizing sound is akin, I think, to the development in the Renaissance of perspective in painting. Perspective provided a kind of orderliness in the process of representing the physical world in two dimensions, but it is really an illusion that excludes many other ways of seeing. Yet it has colored the popular notion of representation right up to the present, since for many people it is the only kind of representation that looks ‘real’. In the same way, tertiary harmony has provided an orderly way of organizing periodic sounds which made possible a great body of musical work, just as perspective made possible a great body of painting, architectural rendering, and so on. But in the process it has limited the ways that people hear and what they are able to consider as music. So I agree with James Tenney that any two sounds have some salient tonal relationship and that the meaning of harmony in music has come to be too narrowly defined. In this sense, I do think, as you suggest, that an amalgam of historical and world music models can lead, not to a new ‘common practice,’ but to a new and expanded (even cosmic) view of tonality, or perhaps more accurately, harmony. In addition, I think the world music model will point us back to the ancient system of organizing periodic sounds which, as Xenakis has pointed out, was not based on scales and modes related to the octave, but on tetrachords and systems.
In my own work I am interested now in exploring this issue of how things interpenetrate. I am interested in organizing disparate elements by way of what I would call simultaneity and synchronicity. With simultaneity the different elements operate independently, but share some common referents such as time and space. With synchronicity the disparate elements come into ‘sync’ with one another so they share a sudden and unexpected unity. Synchronicity is like an epiphany, a moment when simultaneities reveal the underlying or hidden interpenetration that has been there all along. This to me in some way describes the way that things interact in the world. Such an orientation shifts focus from form, development, logic, to unfolding, surprise, moment, mystery, and revelation. I think that artists must engage in a process of what Fredric Jameson calls cognitive mapping. That is they must seek to expand perception and endow individuals with a heightened sense of place in the global system. This means demonstrating ways that things interpenetrate and encouraging a sense of unity through differentiation and interdependence.
Devereaux: You bring up an interesting point in regards to the transformation of minimalism from an ‘evolutionary’ influence into a ‘reactionary’ element. In his introduction to the Anti-Aesthetic Hal Foster defines two types of postmodernism: a postmodernism which seeks to deconstruct modernism and resist the status quo and a postmodernism which repudiates modernism to celebrate the status quo—what he terms a postmodernism of resistance and a postmodernism of reaction.
If minimalist composers “became more concerned with formalism and presentation” as a necessary result of the increasing acceptance of their work and the need to commodify it, this would then seem to locate the original impetus for change with the public’s increased acceptance of the music. Can music engage an audience at a particular historical moment in a positive communicative act—and not a sublimating false consciousness—before it is commodified? If, as Suzi Gablik says, the primary mode of modernism was confrontation, what is the primary mode of postmodernism in music?
Powell: The delineation between modernism and postmodernism is simply impossible to make. It is a continuum. It is much easier to decide what is yin and what is yang! As I said, I appreciate Suzi Gablik’s interest in balancing collaboration, community, and nurturing against the individual or confrontational mode. Yet, at the same time, attempts to characterize an era with a single word or quality are perhaps counterproductive, because such words oversimplify what is highly complex. In any time period there are works that are evolutionary and works that are revolutionary; works that reaffirm the accepted cultural values and ones that challenge those values; readerly and writerly works, as Roland Barthes calls them in literature. Perhaps the key revolution that marks the postmodern period is a revolution in materials, the throwing open of the door, so to speak, so that the materials of art can no longer be delimited. In music, this resulted in the post-Cagean notion of all sounds as music; in art it resulted in the post-Duchampean idea of all objects as art. Context became important and ideas were elevated, in some cases, above content. The autonomous work of art was dethroned. Douglas Kahn feels that the result of this process was that music was filled-up, so that it included everything. But one might just as easily say that music was emptied out, so that it might include anything; and this made the revolution in materials possible.
Perhaps confrontation is not the right way to characterize the so-called modern era. It seems that the postmodern era is headed more and more towards confrontation. In modernism the confrontation was really in the area of aesthetics. Now we see work that is overtly confrontational on political and moral issues as well. Art is increasingly feared and misunderstood by the conservative faction of the culture. There is less and less tolerance, so that some people feel they now have the right to control the content of art in the interest of the common good. Yet in the West high value is placed on freedom of expression. Obviously a philosophy that is built on universal notions such as society or the common good will be at odds with a philosophy built on the individual and individual freedom. Look at Hegel and Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard believed that philosophy is an intensely personal thing that can only derive from the unique individual, in other words it is ‘existential’. So he rejected the German idealist philosophers who were interested in mankind, the state, and so on. In the United States conservative forces control the state. They are well organized and they have an agenda that includes belief in their value system and the right to institutionalize it. Over against that we have the world of the imagination and the spirit that respects individuality.
Both individuality and community have a place in music. Some music is intensely personal and might be best played alone as a form of self-expression, or enjoyment, or discipline. The blues, for example, was probably this type of music in its early stages of development immediately following the Emancipation. Later the music became more polished and stylized as it developed into entertainment for a larger audience. I think at that historical moment there probably was positive communication between the musicians and the members of the audience. Perhaps when blues entered the recorded media, the moment came when commodification took over.
It seems to me that musical styles usually emerge as an expression of the socio-political ethos of a group of people at a certain time in history; and these musical expressions are usually an amalgam of earlier musical styles and possibly diverse cultural influences. The original exploratory efforts are not in the public eye, but are sustained by the enthusiasm of the explorers themselves or by a small clique of friends and like-minded people. Their isolation is the product of their socio-political situation and has nothing to do with the music itself. Youth sub-culture is often the source of new musical ideas because it is historically one of the most suppressed groups in our culture. Societies are largely gerontocracies, with the old always dominating the young. In fact, as Murray Bookchin has pointed out, a gerontocracy was probably the first form of hierarchy to exist in society. Even today youth are constantly censored and incarcerated against their will. Therefore the music of the youth sub-culture must maintain its rebellious stance over against the dominant society; it must constantly change to remain somewhat free of the oppression of commodification. Economic forces eventually quell the rebelliousness of youth because the only jobs available to most young people are those provided by the dominant culture.
So we see in Western culture what Brooks Adams called the triumph of the economic mind over the imaginative. This is precisely the triumph that has made possible the dreadful split between art and life in our culture. People do not need art in their lives to feel fulfilled. Fulfillment is more apt to be found in material possessions. The argument is often made that modern art or modern music lost touch with its audience and became esoteric or solipsistic. But this is not the case. The culture turned away from the imagination to the economic mind. People have ceased to find fulfillment in art and so have lost touch with it. So the issue is not confrontation so much as it is alienation; and it is not the artist who is alienated from society, so much as it is the society that is alienated from art. Art is kept alive in vital sub-cultures and there is simply no other way for it to be in our current society. There is popular culture, of course; in fact, it is one of the characteristics of postmodernism to nod to popular culture, to acclaim it, or to re-evaluate it from a non-elitist standpoint. There may even be significant artistic efforts within popular culture, but they are the exception, not the rule.
Devereaux: I don’t see how you can say that a distinction can’t be made between modernism and postmodernism. They are two radically different cultural paradigms. Postmodernism is not a “revolution in materials;” it is a revolution in relationships.
In its simplest terms, aesthetic modernism represented a trajectory of increasing formal abstraction. The focus on the material essence of the autonomous work of art was the raison d’etre of aesthetic modernism as articulated by Greenberg—an obsession that ultimately led to the exhaustion of modernism in the conceptual art movement’s attempt to ‘free’ art by denying art its material nature. However, even the modernist notion of the ‘free’ artist, which has its roots in Romanticism, was not exempt from co-option as Serge Guilbaut has shown in his study of abstract expressionist painting and the efforts by the United States government to promote cultural forms abroad as the supreme manifestations of freedom (i.e., the equation of artistic freedom with political freedom). Only Cage addressed the real issue of freedom by focusing the question not on the music but on the listener.
The issue, you raise, of context, on the other hand, is not one of material but of relationship, and, consequently, much more problematic. The late-minimal artists denial of the object status of the work was in itself an obsession with material. By bringing into question the context of the work—I’m thinking of, in particular, the earthworks and site-specific pieces of the late 1960s and early 1970s—they attempted to deny the work object status within the system of commodification of late modernity. Ultimately, they failed because of the privileged position the works assumed removed from their ‘normal’ cultural context. It is not surprising that most, if not all, of the minimal artists were white males (and not incidental, I might add, that most of the artists to play a significant role in the formulation of a postmodern aesthetic in the late 70s and early 80s, women). The minimal and conceptual artists’ great failure was, like Marx, their inability to foresee the resiliency of capitalism to find new—and increasingly more abstract—markets. As an evolutionary, dialectical process modernism continued to reaffirm itself until its material sources were depleted.
The confusion of the two modernisms, one a product of scientific and technological progress aligned with capitalism, and the other an aesthetic concept, has only exacerbated the present critical crisis. As the prevailing cultural hegemony, aesthetic modernism embodied the values of, was championed by, and was finally consumed by modernity. Means of expression and aesthetic style became inextricably linked. The fatal, self-alienating flaw of modernism was its equation of aesthetic and cultural confrontation.
Charles Jencks, at least half facetiously, writes that postmodernism began at precisely 3:30 pm on July 15, 1972 when the city of St. Louis blew up the Pruitt-Igo housing complex. Built only a decade earlier but hence fallen into disrepair, the destruction of the complex represented not only an indication of the failure of the Great Society to cope with its problems, but the admission of the bankruptcy of the utopian vision at the center of modernism. I would trace the roots of postmodernism, instead, to the work of DuChamp, Cage, and much later LaMonte Young, Joseph Bueys, Hans Haacke and others, who each in their own way brought into question the cultural agencies that mediate art in our society. This was an inherently structural and ultimately postmodern act. Their work was distinct from the minimalists who took context as object. It was only in the shift in focus to the relationship between the work of art and its cultural context that the work became truly ‘postmodern’ because in that shift the audience/viewer was brought back into the picture (both literally and figuratively). The return to figuration in painting symbolized, in a sense, this reincorporation—a grand metaphor for the reorientation of a cultural dialogue. Art no longer stood outside of society, and in that way, art needed to directly address social concerns. What’s more, the meaning of the work of art was no longer located only in the present but was the product of the interaction of the present with the past—the foundation of hermeneutics. The recognition that history is not receding but reorienting itself in relationship to us is the essence of postmodernism.
The amazing thing to me is not that our culture has been undergoing a paradigm shift, but that it took so long for it to be widely recognized. Never has a culture’s demise been so widely predicted, prognosticated by both Marxists’ critiques of late-capitalism and the adherents of structuralism. The symptoms—institutional decay, the formal depletion of aesthetic modernism, the troubling anomalies in the scientific model—have been surfacing for years. Ironically, the legacy of modernism has left us ill equipped to cope with the ‘postmodernist project’ before us. How appropriate that the apex of the United States’ success in promulgating capitalism as a world economic system was arrived at not through massive military might but massive military spending: simply put, we ‘out-shopped’ the Russians.
But at what costs? Military spending has left both ‘super-powers’ morally and economically bankrupt. The absence of the threat of communism has caused a ‘crisis’ of cultural assessment at home and blatantly exposed the ethical lacunae at the core of the prevailing cultural aristocracy. The complicity of the media in the obfuscation of the distinctions between democracy and capitalism is only the most recent attempt to disguise the underlying moral vacuity of a culture defined by the economic mind. The issue in the 80s became not one of values but of qualifications, not one of ethics but of efficiency—or as Michael Dukakis (the ‘liberal’ candidate in the election!) put it during the 1988 presidential campaign—not one of ‘vision’ but of ‘competency’. It could be argued that the National Endowment for the Arts fulfilled this cultural mandate. In articulating policy they helped create a new component of the technocracy heretofore non-existent: the art administrator.
Music always requires a greater leap of faith. An analogy between the renewed interest in tonality and the return of the figure in painting is not so easily made. In a way, music has been at a loss for what to do ever since Cage ‘opened up’ music to the possibility of all sounds. With that simple but profound act the material focus of music was suddenly exhausted. Composers responded the only way they could within the modernist paradigm; they turned to formalism. Sure, some composers seized the challenge to include all sound within the domain of music, but the unrealistic hopes placed on electronic music (a further manifestation of the alignment of aesthetic modernism with technological modernity as a ‘solution’ to its increasing sense of alienation) and the cultural baggage of a tradition heavily invested in the institutions of the symphony orchestra and the piano keyboard were too great for the new music community to overcome. Left in this situation, music’s relationship to culture simply stagnated; true musical exploration was forced into extremely marginalized positions. Music became paralyzed, caught between paradigms, in the gap Gramsci described as the recognition that “the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born.”
The identity of time and self constitutes the foundation of modernist culture. In it’s fascination with time-based arts (i.e., film) and the expression of temporal ideas in all the arts (cubism, abstract expressionism, etc.) modernism both formed and expressed certain cultural perceptions concerning time. Modernism’s technological impulse was to divorce the ‘act’ of art from the work with twofold consequences, one aesthetic, one social. This attempt to “preserve the moment’ was an aesthetic project only finally realized in its logical extension: the minimalists’ work of LaMonte Young and Terry Riley. The social consequences of this impulse were far more diverse.
Photography, film, and sound recording all represented increasingly sophisticated representations of our physical world, the epitome of the extension of the modernist project and the legacy of the scientific Enlightenment. This did two things: it obviated the need for painting to ‘represent’ reality, and it ‘freed’ music from the obligation of ‘conserving’ the past. The separation of the act of music making from music further reaffirmed the concept of the autonomous work of art able to stand on its own merits, and it intensified the focus on materials. Music stood apart from the ‘act’ divorced of any social function. Cage’s characteristic response was to deny all function to music, to remove the self from music, because by denying the modernist linkage between self and the work of art he exploded the paradigm. In his total denial of both the function and the communicative impetus of art, Cage stands outside both modernist and postmodernist paradigms.
The second social consequence of recording was that it allowed all music to exist simultaneously in a democratized form, across both space and time. The positive enculturating aspects of this development were legion: the case of Henry Cowell—and in turn Lou Harrison and John Cage—being exposed to the musics of the world through recordings remains, perhaps, the most famous example. Recording, however, only accelerated the conception, or perhaps more accurately demonstrated, the modernist notion of us removed from tradition. With its focus on the new, the unique, and the present, modernism brought about the self-conscious recognition of our alienation from our past necessary for the emergence of a distinct youth culture. The establishment of a gerontocracy, and the reaction against it (the social manifestation of the Oedipal myth), is only necessary in a culture that sees its past as separate from the present.
The third social consequence of recording was that it paved the way for the commodification of music. (Since institutionalized slavery had become out of vogue in our society by then, this development came in just the nick of time!) Various attempts by a youth sub-culture to cause a rupture in this social arrangement have been successively thwarted. Contemporary rock music no longer embodies “an expression of the socio-political ethos of a group of people at a certain time in history” but, in large part, a co-opted cultural form. The young are no longer the ‘producers’ in control of the art form; the authority of capitalism has been reaffirmed, and the old distinction between consumers and producers re-established once more.
By the foregoing I don’t mean to imply that these social ramifications were caused by some agent-less technological change. The impact of recording on music was only an extension of the modernist project; modernism developed the tools most appropriate to the task. With the demise of modernism, the question now becomes; how will these old tools be put to new use and what new tools will emerge? The strong alignment of ‘serious’ music composers with the stylistic language of aesthetic modernism has resulted in a plethora of competing stylistic languages that have emerged among the ruins of modernism. The positive aspect of modernism’s demise is the ‘crack’ in the cultural hegemony left in its wake.
This is where the most important distinction needs to be made, the distinction between the revolutionary and reactionary elements of postmodernism, the imaginative and economic mind. The absence of a common practice has resulted in the failure to differentiate between ideologically diverse cultural strategies. Students, musicians, composers, and audiences alike have been further confused by the fact that discussions of value systems have often been masked in a hermetic vocabulary. Music, as it is practiced, remains an intimidating, alienating art form to most, which, in large part accounts for the veracity with which an entire generation responded by moving musical discourse out of the concert hall and into the garage. It is the failure of music to develop a significant body of criticism that transcends this hermetic vocabulary that is precisely why the music of John Adams can be championed as ‘new’ when, in reality, it represents little more than stylistic responses to a structural and ideological problem. Adams, to me, at least seems to be aware that, as Walter Benjamin said, “one must speak ironically when using a dead language.”
If new “musical expressions are usually an amalgam of earlier musical styles and possibly diverse cultural influences,” what new musical hybrids will emerge? Will we come to realize, what Levi-Strauss calls the symmetrical (or complementary) and equivalent aspects of both historical and cultural difference? More importantly, will we, as Lou Harrison has pointed out, realize that there are only musical hybrids?
For me as a composer, I feel the first question I have to ask myself is what kind of society is proposed by this music. What cultural values does it affirm and which ones does it reject? It comes down to a reevaluation of the legacy of the tradition, a rereading of the tradition, if you will, in an effort to redefine for myself a method for arriving at a language that is both theoretically and phenomenologically satisfying; in short, to reconcile theory and praxis. This has caused me to evaluate the basis of musical systems, not from a point of view of stylistic determinants, but as an expression of their alignments with, and distinctions from, the sciences, linguistics, information theory, politics, and philosophy. If the function of all art is to engage in a dialogue with society, how can music manifest itself as social critique? Granted, this presupposes the idea of music as communication, but I certainly hope it does not limit the communicative act to only that within known cognitive processes.
In this way, I find myself drawn to the beliefs of Martin Luther King, Jr. in my current work. It is precisely in King’s interpretation of the function of non-violence as a social force, which he so vehemently, and rigorously, advocated during his lifetime, that I find parallels with the present situation in the arts. King believed the authority of non-violence to bring about social change derived from its moral and theoretical foundation. Its critique of society posits an alternative society only through action; its objective only manifests itself through process.
Powell: I don’t want to get into a debate over the meaning of modern and postmodern. However, I think you may have misunderstood what I meant when I talked about a “revolution in materials.” I do not agree that Cage’s work exhausted the material focus of music. What it did in fact was liberate music from suffocating constraints, open it up to a more holistic view of the world of sound as a material resource for composition. A lot of the focus on Cage’s work has been on his innovations in methodology, particularly his use of chance processes. However, the methodology was really secondary to his innovations in materials. Tenney points this out in his article “John Cage and the Theory of Harmony.” Methodology lends itself better to systematic thinking, and it seems that people prefer systems and authoritarianism to mystery and freedom. So Boulez is a national hero in France, while Morton Feldman dies in relative obscurity here. Nor do I think Cage’s work serves to deny the function of music. He only narrowed the focus of its function to that of transforming consciousness and perception. For Cage personally, the usefulness of composing lies in its discipline. Cage believes implicitly in disciplined action and composing is his form of Zen sitting. There is an extreme sense of self-denial in Cage’s work. Feldman talks about wanting to say to Cage after a concert, “let me extend my condolences to you personally, but tell Atlas Eclipticalis it was the most thrilling experience of my life.”
I think your point about postmodernism being concerned with a reorientation toward history is true. I am reminded of a remark attributed to de Kooning: “History doesn’t influence me. I influence it.” He obviously understood that what is important about history is how the present influences our view of the past. It’s true, modernists wanted to separate themselves from history; as Feldman said, “sound does not know its own history.” Perhaps this loneliness is too great for artists today. They want the camaraderie of history. History, however, perpetuates many things, including the gerontacracies that we have spoken about. The establishment of gerontocracies is not just unique to our culture or even to modern cultures. It is an ancient practice possibly first established by shamans when they denied direct access to the spiritual and set themselves up in a proprietary position that preserved their position of control on into old age, long after their physical strength had waned. As you suggest, the Oedipal mythology (or Freud’s Oedipus Complex) is an expression of this situation. The myth expresses the repressed desire on the part of the youthful male to supersede the father’s position of authority. But more importantly it represents the inability of the male child to break the bond with the mother, thereby allowing him to discover his own true male identity over/against, but independent of, the father. The father must enable this to happen or become the object of the rebellion. Yet he is unable to do it because he wants to perpetuate himself.
Norman O. Brown suggests that the life of the clan consists in the perpetual reincarnation of ancestors, that children are reincarnated ghosts. A person is not himself, but rather is always a mask. In other words, one’s soul is not one’s own, but daddy’s: the Oedipus Complex. The miracle of our American precursors like Cage, Feldman, Harrison, etc. is that they gave us this amazing freedom, they severed us from the tyranny of the European lineage. They did their fatherly job well, in spite of themselves perhaps. In fact, our musical precursors here in America have given us a great gift, handed it to us on a platter. Our music institutions have failed to acknowledge it, understand it, or accept it. By doing so they have made themselves irrelevant.
